High CPU and energy impacts on MacOS v10.72.2

[Superdha 0]

Hello,
Evernote Helper (Renderer) process is constantly using relatively high CPU when I'm not even using the app and it's sitting in the background. 20-100% usually, and always the highest CPU usage (consistently higher than word, excel, safari, etc.). When using the app a bit for relatively mild tasks, eg creating text notes, moving notes, the CPU spikes to 300+% and stays there for minutes after completing them %. The spikes are what I noticed initially (random slowing down / lagging when using other apps, checked CPU usage to find Evernote was in fact the culprit) and what I'm most concerned about, but now that I'm keeping an eye on it I can't help but notice it being #1 for CPU usage, always, even when it's sitting unused and minimised.

I would like to avoid having to uninstall/reinstall etc. Anyone else having similar issues? I don't recall this with recent updates, in fact I was so pleased that recent updates were stable, relatively bug free and were consistently fixing bugs. Is this a known bug with v10.72.2, and is there a fix coming soon?

Thank you.

10.72.2-mac-ddl-public (20240116183719)
Editor: v176.50.2
Service: v1.88.1
macOS Sonoma 14.2.1

MacBook Pro M1 16GB RAM, with usually amazing battery life but not since whatever this issue is

[PinkElephant 8,174]

You have a local database corruption that causes the app to crunch on a piece of data.

Log out, quit the app, uninstall, using AppCleaner. 

The restart the Mac, install from the EN website. Open the app, log in. Keep it running because it will download a fresh copy of your data from the cloud server.

[Superdha 0]

Update: For some reason I couldn't update within the app to the latest version. Downloaded the latest version from Evernote website. Issues remain with v10.73.3

[Superdha 0]

1 minute ago, PinkElephant said:

You have a local database corruption that causes the app to crunch on a piece of data.

Log out, quit the app, uninstall, using AppCleaner. 

The restart the Mac, install from the EN website. Open the app, log in. Keep it running because it will download a fresh copy of your data from the cloud server.

Thanks. Is there any way to find out if this is the actual cause, before doing this? Reason being that I love/need to have my notes offline. Since the v10 is not really truly offline (it doesn't download every note and attachment, despite weeks and weeks of being on - it seems you have to actually open notes to force this / ensure this), it took me ages to manually flick through thousands of notes (couldn't do all 11000+ notes, so restricted to those important ones in my next actions/to read/cabinet notebooks), and I'd rather not do that again!

 

[PinkElephant 8,174]

Unless you don’t remove the piece of data that causes the problem, the app will try to process it, fail, try again, …

The only way to remove the data in v10 is by replacing the local database.

Personally I wouldn’t like this either, but as far as we can tell, there is no other method.

Support has picked up on what we say, and will likely tell the same. You can try, but I doubt there will be another silver bullet.

[Boot17 1,467]

@Superdha FWIW - I had a similar problem over the summer and used AppCleaner and then I still had the same high CPU problem after a reinstall. See my comment here in this related thread: 

A couple of users said that Evernote Support said it was a bug back then, but not sure how accurate those reports are.

Having said that, I still think it might be worth a try to use AppCleaner as underlying causes could be different and it's several months later -- I just don't think it's a silver bullet.

Also FWIW - I'm on 10.72.2 on Mac as well and I am not having that issue currently and haven't had that issue for many months.

[fithwaites 0]

Agree, this is utter BS that you cannot remove the helper icon it takes up so much CPU and i want to remove it. I have been a user since 2012 and im contemplating leaving as the product is deteriorating significantly. Removing the ability to prevent auto updates is insane. 

Anyone have any hacks to remove the stupid helper and stop auto updates? 

[PinkElephant 8,174]

Panic ! The ugly Helper is squeezing the last cycles out of my CPU. How stupid ! Rant, rant, rant.

OK, hold a minute:

First the EN helper in activity monitor is NOT (NO,NO,NO) the little icon that sits snuggly in your menu bar. So put down your cal .45, it won't help if you blow it off your menu bar (and might damage your display).

The Helper is the name for a background process, or really a bunch of them.

Second when you run a v10 client, you actually run an amputated chrome(ium) browser, one without a front end. The app serves as front end. And Chrome is not famous for going easy on CPU or system resources. So you are barking up the wrong tree (Hear that, Google ?).

Third what do you think why a CPU is installed on your Mac ? To be left idle ? The activity monitor measures percentages per core. So 20% means that one of the cores is used with 20% of its total capacity. Which is hardly anything to panic about.

It is practically a framework (build from Chrome) that runs, and inside of the framework the app is running. This resembles more a virtual machine with an app inside of it. For this, 20% of a core is in fact pretty good. And nothing you will notice in terms of performance (unless it is an MacBook 12" with 2 Intel cores and without cooling).

Why did they choose a framework ? Because it means unified code for all platforms, and the framework handles the interaction with the OS. They are not alone doing so, using a framework (in this case Electron) is pretty common these days. Don't like it ? Use the web client.